Mehdi-Georges Lahlou

Mehdi-Georges Lahlou produces performances and installations that deal with humour both cultural identities and “gender”, to the point of dissolving the one in the others. And indeed, if gender is socially constructed, as opposed to biological sex, then it is caught in the cultural fabric in which it is built whatever it is.

Bio

Juggling from one community to another, from the ethnicity to the «gender», by its burlesque actions, Lahlou makes an undermined work. He is engaged in a kind of typology of clichés associated with Arabian- Muslim world, and attacks it with knocks of red stiletto heels, during performances, which are all sports achievements supposed to challenge testosterone.

Process

These high heel shoes are those of the topical figure of what the queer, the transsexual or the transvestite is. The «Arab head» of the photograph meets the vamp shoes: stigma + stigma = 0 He tackles the definition of masculinity in the cultural sphere, and, he tests, somehow tirelessly, performance after performance, the shaking of this culture, here and there, by the deconstruction of the «genre», dreaming of a reconciliation of the «contraries».